I extended VM virtual machine disk but its only half showing...

[Mattybristol]

Hi

I extended my VM fusion for mac virtual machine disk but its only half showing...

I have the latest version of VMware fusion and i am running a windows 7 virtual machine.  My Win 7 virtual machine c drive was running out of space so i went to Virtual Machine > Settings > Hard Disk and used the slider to increase the disk size from 100 GB to 250 GB.

• Now when I right click the C drive from My Computer it is showing the old size still (100 GB)

• From the Windows 7 Computer Management console it is only half showing the changed size. See image attached.  The (C:) volume is showing the old size but the Disc 0 (which is the same thing) is showing the new larger size.

Notes:

• I have no snap shots
• I have also booted to gparted-live to check from there and that is showing the new larger size as it should be.
• When i right clcik the drive from the computer management console in Win 7 the 'Expand'option is greyed out.

Can anyone please help with how I can get C: drive to show the full new capacity?

Many thanks in advance. Matt

[continuum]

> I have also booted to gparted-live to check from there and that is showing the new larger size as it should be.

Does gparted show a NTFS partition of 250 Gb ?

How exactly did you expand the partition C: ?

[Mattybristol]

Hi,

Yes, Gparted showed 250 NTFS and te method i used to expand the virtual drive was as detailed above: from the vm machine i went to Settings > Hard Disk and used the slider to increase the disk size from 100 GB to 250 GB.

Any help would be massively helpful!

Thanks, Matt

[continuum]

using the slider in VMware settings just expands the disk - do you realize that this does NOT expand the partition ?

[Mattybristol]

When i used the slider i did not realise that - but yes i have since realised that this is the case.  I read online that i need to then expand the drive from within the vm machine.  However when i went to do this (from computer management console in Win 7 the 'Expand'option is greyed out and won't allow me to expand.  That is when i used gparted as i read that it could be done using that - however gparted showed the partition as 250 gb already and woiuld not allow any change.

I am therefore stuck as to how i can expand it from within the VM.

Also i am confused that (as the image i posted shows) the vm win7 management console does alrady show the expanded size (250 gb) altough the chart that is shown when i right click the c: drive only shows the old size.  I can't work out why it would show in the vm disk mamanement console as the new size yet on the same vm c: drive it is only showin as 100 gb.

thanks.

[continuum]

I would run chkdsk /f /x /r C: and reboot

[WoodyZ]

I wouldn't do anything until either you have a current User Data Backup of what resides in the Virtual Machine and or the Virtual Machine itself!

Then after trying what Ulli suggests, if that doesn't work then per a suggestion I saw in another thread a while back by a.p. I'd try resizing downward and then back upwards the partition.  Hopefully that will rectify things.  The other option is to image the drive to another using something like Ghost.

[Mattybristol]

WoodyZ thanks i have the back up, so am safe!

Ulli Hanklen - thanks for that cmd line i will do that and report back. thanks again guys.

[Mattybristol]

Hi Continuum - I tried the chkdsk cmd you usggested but it hasnt changed anything. I also rua EASUS on the vm machine and it showed this:

Do you have any other ideas at all? thanks!

[WoodyZ]

I'm going to repeat myself since it appears you've ignored what I previously said...

"Then after trying what Ulli suggests, if that doesn't work then per a suggestion I saw in another thread a while back by a.p. I'd try resizing downward and then back upwards the partition.  Hopefully that will rectify things.  The other option is to image the drive to another using something like Ghost."

BTW The resizing it done to the Filesystem of the Guest not the size of the virtual hard disk itself since it cannot be downsized from its Settings once the disk is partitioned/formatted/OS Installed.

[Mattybristol]

Hi Woodyz - i wasnt ignoring your post - i hadnt had time to do what you said that night. I appreciate your input and didnt intend to offend.  I will try what you suggested today; how would i go about downsizing in the guest ssytem? Can i do that whilst running it or do i need to use a third party tool? Thanks again, matt

[WoodyZ]

No offense taken, just wanted to make sure you had other options to try.

BTW  I've see this behavior/issue several times in the forums although off the top of my head I do not recall what the out come has been.

One way for sure the issue can be resolved is to image the drive with a program like Ghost however the easier solution may be to shrink the volume in Disk Management and then extend the volume.  Another option to Disk Management would be using GParted Live.  There is also diskpart from the Command Prompt however it's CLI Utility and not User friendly.

As I previously said I read this in another discussion thread and this was a suggestion by one of the other members that helps as Ulli and I do so it is something that I'd certainly give a try and as always make sure you are properly backed up before modifying the virtual hard disk.

[Mattybristol]

Hi Guys

Disk Management wouldn’t let me downsize so i did it with GPARTED - which seemed to work however when i restarted the VM wouldn’t boot and I received a black screen saying that i needed to put in my win 7 installation disk as it needed to carry out a system repair! So no good I’m afraid!
I have restored the backed up vm to my mac and I’m back to square one… any further ideas?
Thanks again, Matt

[WoodyZ]

Mattybristol wrote:

Disk Management wouldn’t let me downsize so i did it with GPARTED - which seemed to work however when i restarted the VM wouldn’t boot and I received a black screen saying that i needed to put in my win 7 installation disk as it needed to carry out a system repair! So no good I’m afraid!
I have restored the backed up vm to my mac and I’m back to square one… any further ideas?
Thanks again, Matt

Resizing a virtual hard disk is a multistep process, changing the size of the virtual disk itself and then doing the steps necessary to utilize the added space either by expanding the existing virtual partition or creating additional partitions.  Which leads me to the following question...

How, explicitly and specifically, did you expand the disk/partition the first time?

If expanding the disk/partition fails under normal techniques then I'd image the existing virtual hard drive to another using Symantec Norton Ghost or similar disk imaging product, then swap the drives out in the .vmx configuration file.

[mamiller41]

I wanted to document that I experienced the same issue as described in this post. I was able to rectify the problem by first adding another 1 GB to the hard drive I was trying to expand (using the slider in the VMWare virtual machine/settings/hard disc window). Once that was done, and vmware had expanded the disc, I viewed the drive in "disc management" in windows xp. I still saw the disconnect between the two values in the disk management pane, just as reported by the user who started this thread. But now I also saw a new 1GB unallocated partition at the edge of the drive I was trying to expand. I opened easeus and dragged the edge of the allocated hard drive to the right until it took over all the new unallocated space. Then I applied the changes. On restart my disc was expanded correctly. I am not sure what happened the first try, but suspect something went wrong with the initial disc expansion....

[WoodyZ]

I personally have never had a failure of the first stage however I've seen it reported only a few or so times over the years.  Nonetheless, this is why aside from the fact that one should always maintain proper* backups anyway, it is very important when performing disk level operations on either stage such as this that one ensures that they have a known good working backup to fall back on in the event of an irreparable failure of either stage.

==========

* It is a known fact that Time Machine is not 100% reliable backing up/restoring Virtual Machines under all circumstances/conditions.  Also backing up Virtual Machines via Time Machine is disk/time intensive and wastes a tremendous amount of space for something that may be corrupt and worthless come time to restore it.  At a minimum I would exclude Virtual Machines from Time Machine and with the Virtual Machines shutdown, not suspended, and VMware Fusion closed then manually copy the Virtual Machines Package(s) to an alternate location, preferably on to a different physical hard disk.  Then keep the User Data that is stored within the Virtual Machine backed up off of the Virtual Machine on a regular basis so as to always have a current User Data Backup.  If you have to restore a properly backed up Virtual Machine that is not as current at least you'll have a working Virtual Machine and current User Data to go forward with when you find out your Time Machine Backup of the Virtual Machine fails.

[harmandeep]

i also faced similar issue recently, and no tools were able to fix that - be it FileSystemTools (CHKDSK) or DiskPartioning Tools (PARTED).

So, what i did that i again expanded mine VDISK (this time - i expanded Slightly - mere 200 MiB)  from 10GiB to 10.2GiB (in ur case u can try expanding it to 250.x or 251GiB --- provided available host disk space) followed by extending the in GuestOS using DISKPART --- and thereby - Windows recognized actual correct Available Disk Space on Partition.

Hope this resolves your ISSUE.

Regards

[duaneinak]

This has probably no doubt been tried, but I had a similar issue, and finally resolved by opening disk management on guest and noticed an unpartitioned space in addition to 'c'.  Extended the 'c' partition to the unpartitioned space, and resolved.

[gdd9000]

Hi - I just wasted almost an entire day trying to fix the same problem. After reading many responses, articles from vmware, etc, I finally stumbled across one that mentioned that the initial resizing of the virtual disk via settings, can be done while holding the option key down. Hadnt seen that anywhere. I had tried to first go from 60 to 90, fail. Showed up the same way yours did. Then to 100, fail. Then 102, fail. Then 105, with the option key held while resizing. Sure enough, go into EaseUS after and the 3 extra GM from 102 to 105 show up as unallocated. So I expanded the 102 to 105, even though the 102 had still shown as a nearly full 60. EaseUS ran, rebooted, and then did the partitioning on reboot. Opened up the VM, sure enough, 105 all set with over 40gb free. FINALLY!

So, try one more resize, slightly larger, with the option key held, THEN do the manual partition extension.

[karthikg2013]

The procedure on how to expand virtual disks is explained in the article - VMware KB: Increasing the size of a disk partition for future reference